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This still vexes me greatly. Some young people (I'm old... everyone seems young) think it was all very silly in retrospect. When I have the time, I will explai

This still vexes me greatly. Some young people (I'm old... everyone seems young) think it was all very silly in retrospect. When I have the time, I will explain to them just how serious it really was, media reports notwithstanding, and that the only reason things didn't go very badly was the work of a great cadre of programmers working hard to make sure bad things did not happen.

wkat4242 3y ago
Yeah the same happens these days for the hole in the ozone layer and acid rain. People think they were hoaxes because the problems are gone. But they are gone precisely because we took them seriously. Luckily they were quite easy to solve, unlike climate change.
Tor3 3y ago
Agreed. In my case, I and the rest of a team spent a year analyzing and finding problem areas, fixed them, ran factory acceptance tests, and finally travelled to a major customer and on-site tested the fixes (this was, at that time, pretty old software). In this particular case a non-fixed Y2K situation would result in a major setback in the type of weather forecasts we all were getting used to at the time.. So yes, nothing much bad happened, _because_ a huge effort was put in everywhere to prevent it.
mr_toad 3y ago
I worked with a lot of systems that had Y2K bugs, but in every single case the failure would have been quickly noticed and fixed (or not: living with buggy software was pretty common). None of the systems were all that reliable in the first place. Software was even more buggy and unreliable than it is today. “Turn it off and on again” was the standard way of fixing things. Manual workarounds were very common. Yet, who knows how much money was spent hunting down and fixing Y2K bugs in systems that were not critical, and where not even dependable. I’d wager that for almost all the systems that a lot of money was spent bringing into compliance, it would have been cheaper and simpler just to let them fail, and deal with the problem afterwards, which would have been just another day at the office.
taylodl 3y ago
ABSOLUTELY 100%!!! IT staved off disaster, a disaster that most of us at the time had no involvement in creating, and what did we get for our herculean efforts and SUCCESS? We got told it was all a hoax. I immediately lose all respect for anyone saying Y2K was a hoax. That just tells me you're another dumb ass falling for conspiracy theories.
- brianmcc 3y ago
  I don't know; for several years afterwards it seemed to be a given that it was a real thing, and efforts to avoid disaster were well directed and successful and that IT folks "did the world a solid". I choose to take it as a (rather dispiriting) lesson about humanity that only ~20 years later there's such scepticism. Certainly explains why the cranks cast doubt on moon landings and other historical events.
  - taylodl 3y ago
    I recall the Y2K hoax story appearing very early on. It soon got supplanted by the 9/11 "hoax."

wkat4242 3y ago

Yeah the same happens these days for the hole in the ozone layer and acid rain. People think they were hoaxes because the problems are gone. But they are gone precisely because we took them seriously. Luckily they were quite easy to solve, unlike climate change.

Tor3 3y ago

Agreed. In my case, I and the rest of a team spent a year analyzing and finding problem areas, fixed them, ran factory acceptance tests, and finally travelled to a major customer and on-site tested the fixes (this was, at that time, pretty old software). In this particular case a non-fixed Y2K situation would result in a major setback in the type of weather forecasts we all were getting used to at the time.. So yes, nothing much bad happened, _because_ a huge effort was put in everywhere to prevent it.

mr_toad 3y ago

I worked with a lot of systems that had Y2K bugs, but in every single case the failure would have been quickly noticed and fixed (or not: living with buggy software was pretty common). None of the systems were all that reliable in the first place. Software was even more buggy and unreliable than it is today. “Turn it off and on again” was the standard way of fixing things. Manual workarounds were very common. Yet, who knows how much money was spent hunting down and fixing Y2K bugs in systems that were not critical, and where not even dependable. I’d wager that for almost all the systems that a lot of money was spent bringing into compliance, it would have been cheaper and simpler just to let them fail, and deal with the problem afterwards, which would have been just another day at the office.

taylodl 3y ago

ABSOLUTELY 100%!!! IT staved off disaster, a disaster that most of us at the time had no involvement in creating, and what did we get for our herculean efforts and SUCCESS? We got told it was all a hoax. I immediately lose all respect for anyone saying Y2K was a hoax. That just tells me you're another dumb ass falling for conspiracy theories.

brianmcc 3y ago
I don't know; for several years afterwards it seemed to be a given that it was a real thing, and efforts to avoid disaster were well directed and successful and that IT folks "did the world a solid". I choose to take it as a (rather dispiriting) lesson about humanity that only ~20 years later there's such scepticism. Certainly explains why the cranks cast doubt on moon landings and other historical events.
- taylodl 3y ago
  I recall the Y2K hoax story appearing very early on. It soon got supplanted by the 9/11 "hoax."